Hollande reshuffles his lame-duck cabinet

PARIS — François Hollande appointed Bernard Cazeneuve as his new prime minister Tuesday, putting the former interior minister at the helm of a slightly reshuffled cabinet in a restrained response to his falling out with outgoing PM Manuel Valls.

Valls declared his candidacy for the French presidency on Monday night and resigned as prime minister, just a few days after Hollande's December 1 announcement that he would not run for a second term in next May's presidential election.

Hollande stopped short of the more radical shake-up urged by some on the Left and Right, which would have had little meaning considering that the government only has five months to go before a new president and a new parliament take over.

Cazeneuve is a close ally of Hollande with prior experience of succeeding Valls: Back in 2014, Hollande made him interior minister after promoting Valls to prime minister. Valls himself had other ideas for his succession, which Hollande vetoed at the time.

In another sign of the bruises left by Valls’ plotting in recent weeks to force Hollande to renounce seeking a second term, one of the former PM’s most vocal allies, Jean-Marie Le Guen, was demoted in the reshuffle. Instead of the at-times strategic post of junior minister for parliamentary relations, he becomes junior minister for “Francophonie” — the name the French give to countries in the rest of the world where theirs is still the official language.

In another sign that Hollande may not go out of his way to cheer for Valls in the Socialist party primary in January, he kept on three ministers from a small centrist party in the governing coalition, even though that party, the Radicaux de Gauche, has decided to field a candidate against the official Socialist contender next year.

Bruno Le Roux, another close ally and constant supporter of Hollande, will become interior minister to replace Cazeneuve. He hails from the northern Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, an area affected by unemployment and urban decay. As head of the Socialists in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, he often helped the government push through legislation even against the opposition of MPs from the Socialist Party’s left wing.

Calls from some opposition leaders to have Environment Minister Ségolène Royal sacked from the cabinet went unheeded, as expected. Royal, Hollande’s former partner and the mother of his four children, caused an uproar across party lines this week when she hailed deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Havana and insisted there were no political prisoners in the country.

The new cabinet is unlikely to be tasked with a major action plan in the next five months. Even before the summer, Hollande’s aides made it clear the government’s task in the president’s last year would mostly be to pursue foreign policy as usual and implement domestic reforms that have already been voted.

Hollande himself has insisted he will be a full president until his last day, but it's clear even to some of his closest aides that he is not in a position to push through any new reforms that, if serious, would inevitably stir fresh divisions within Socialist ranks. And in any case, the outgoing president’s control over the party is slipping by the day, as its apparatchiks and MPs are scrambling to find their new leader.